I get dinged every now and then for being “one sided” or other things to the same effect. It all rolls off by now. First of all, I don’t believe there was ever any requirement for me to be fair or balanced.  I don’t believe in the concept “fair” anyway, not that I don’t believe in being fair, just that I don’t believe anything is fair. So, get over it.

Balanced in itself is kind of a flawed concept. It implies that whatever reality is, you’re gonna edit it so it comes out equal on both sides. Now that’s just wrong. I acknowledge that there are positives and negatives to almost anything you might name. Very rarely do they really equal or balance out.

The people who say I’m one sided obviously do not read everything here or don’t pay attention to what they’re reading. I mean look at the “What can you say about software you can’t talk about?” post. I’m not supposed to say anything, yet if I say anything at all, it’s positive about 2013. And then I get dinged for being “anti-”. I’ve gone out of my way on many occasions to talk about the potential benefits of the cloud and CAD on the cloud. I even in one post tried to defend SW’s point of view.

Anyway, I’m not concerned that some people think I’m “anti-”whatever or one sided or unbalanced or unfair. I think it’s equally unbalanced to never acknowledge what’s wrong. It’s completely unfair to hold a corporation to a lower standard than you’d hold another individual to. It’s totally “anti-” to think that it’s ok for a corporation to do things that are actually detrimental to their own customers.

If you want positive stuff about SolidWorks, read my books. A thousand pages telling mostly good things about the software. Now that’s unbalanced. For a more realistic view, read both the blog and the book.

Through a comedy of errors in 2008, SW PR offered to let me interview Paul Chastell,  at that time the director of SolidWorks software development. I wanted to talk to someone who could talk candidly, using English that users could understand. I didn’t want canned answers out of the SolidWorks playbook. But it was all I was getting, so I sent him my questions. Now Paul is not a bad guy, but he was definitely in the wrong place at the wrong time, as far as the interview went. I actually feel badly about the way I handled this situation with Paul, which is something I’ve never owned up to in writing. For what it’s worth, 4 years late, I’m sorry for what happened.

The resulting article is still on my blog, called Inadvertent Straight Talk.  This is the kind of thing that should have gotten lost in one of the two blog meltdowns I’ve had since it was written. It’s not worth reading it, but I include the link mainly for reference.

I was trying to write about the role of a Devil’s Advocate in product development for the critical review of ideas. I believe that in order to distill the best idea from any initial idea, you have to have real debate, point and counterpoint. You have to see an issue from multiple points of view. In physical exercise, you don’t improve without some resistance, and I believe the same about developing ideas. Business doesn’t seem to recognize this. So much of business leadership is pathologically focused on the “non-negative”  that ideas get through the system which have not been properly vetted based entirely on enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is a great thing, but it’s not the only thing.

To me, this was the problem with the changes in SolidWorks 2008. The changes were based on a lot of good or even great ideas that had not been thought through. The ideas solved the problem as stated – “interface needs consolidation”. It’s just that no one thought to consider what problems the new solutions might cause. In the end, it took two full releases to fix 2008. This is why I always cringe when SolidWorks implements a customer idea – too often there is a huge caveat that makes it unusable.

Folks at SolidWorks and certain fanboys didn’t understand why I was so opposed to some of the changes. “We did all this customer research” was the common response to any doubts. One huge sign of trouble is when a person or a group doesn’t allow any doubt. It usually means the idea is untested.  It’s that same unassailable belief in fantasy that most people find so annoying in door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesmen.

Anyway, the customer research. SolidWorks can find support among customers for just about anything. What I’ve learned from the SolidWorks Top 10 exercise every year is that users themselves are the source for a whole lot of really bad ideas. There were several ideas in the Top 10 voting this year that had negative tallies. SolidWorks seems to keep track of people “interested” in a particular idea, and then they contact them during the project  for some sort of validation. Two things here. “Interested” to SolidWorks means they support the idea, not that they have experience, an opinion, a real need, or whatever. So the deck is stacked against critical review from the beginning. Second, “validation” is exactly what they are looking for. They are not looking for “negation”. If SolidWorks is talking to users, it is my experience that it is already too late. The idea is already framed, and they are just looking for support. So you often get a one-eyed view of any given issue.

Then there’s this word – grinfuck – which you can read about from Suster, Feld, urban dictionary, and here and there. It means that someone is just telling you what you want to hear, without being honest. Some people call it “being polite”, although I never thought that lying through your teeth was polite. It happens all the time in business, and in personal life. It might even be more common than telling the truth.

There are ways of asking questions in which you form the answer in the hearer’s mind. So it’s possible that SolidWorks is habitually asking to be grinfucked. A lot of people will also just be very polite out of habit, even if that means handing you a major load of bullshit. Other people just like the attention, so if you buy them lunch, or give them special access, they will tell you anything you want to hear, so long as it prolongs the relationship. Just to say that there are a lot of ways to collect bad information using the methods SolidWorks uses, without the expectation of critical review.

You could consider what Paul Chastell did to me as this sort of corporate sanctioned jive. I asked questions, and he replied with playbook pleasantries that didn’t have any real meaning – stuff that is designed for “the press”, not for end user blogs.  But on the other end, software users also grinfuck product definition people by just basking in that glow of being behind the scenes, saying “Yeah! That’ll be GREAT!!” with great enthusiasm. So it happens all the time on both sides.

Over the years, the development of the SolidWorks software has become more and more driven by internal corporate politics (which is corporate jive for “egos”), and the customers just provide justification. Four years ago, when I wrote that misguided blog post on “Inadvertent Straight Talk”, I was really appealing to SolidWorks to filter their ideas through more critical thinking. The ideas that come out the other side will be much stronger, with a broader appeal and usefulness. This concept applies to all stripes of product development. If you can some how coax users to be less “polite”, and more honest, you’ll develop a better product. Read the Mark Suster article for more on that.

Why does this come up now?  SolidWorks World is a place and time to meet SolidWorks employees. They will be looking for validation. If you start talking to someone, tell them what you really think. If you’re in a situation where you have to sacrifice politeness or honesty, always be honest. If there’s something you value, say so. If something doesn’t look like a good idea, let them know. Don’t just smile and say “Yeah! That’ll be GREAT!!” if you don’t really mean it.

Let’s say you want to start a business. The easiest way to start a business is to get other people to do the work for you. And even easier than that is to get other people to just collect stuff they find from anywhere and everywhere, and put it up on your site so you can say you’ve got a lot of cool content. Whew! Sure beats work, and having to know or do something! Brilliant business strategy. And no, I’m not talking about Megaupload. I’m talking about GrabCAD. Sorry, no link.

Your "best"?!? You've done nothing at all!

So, GrabCAD, if I downloaded all the code for your site, and was able to redirect your traffic so that people came to the Matt Lombard GrabCAD instead of your GrabCAD, how would you feel about that? I mean really?

If you were starting an up/download site, and you wanted to be seen as a legitimate business, wouldn’t you be aware that it would be possible for people to upload stuff that wasn’t theirs, and misrepresent it as their own? Or maybe you just don’t give a shit, because if its on the web, it belongs to anybody.

Yeah, have a look at your own site from time to time.

The actual GrabCAD site doesn’t have a mechanism to flag stuff as inappropriate. So I made a call to somebody I knew who is associated with the site. No answer. Found another number on the website. No answer. So I took it to Twitter. It’s not just the impersonal faceless Hollywood studios that are getting ripped off, it’s guys like me, and actually a lot of other people. How many people uploaded someone elses model of Audi TT, R8, Camaro, etc… ? There are tons of duplicate models up there, and its not because a bunch of people all accidentally model the same thing the same way with the same name. The owners of this site have to know that misrepresenting stuff is going to happen, but they don’t have any way to address it.

They removed 1 file. Speck. Mote. Open your eyes.

But as soon as I complained in public on Twitter, I got a response very quickly, and they immediately figured out that they needed to make some changes. How is that?

If I wanted the exposure of putting my stuff up on GrabCAD, I’d put my stuff up on GrabCAD. I know how. Having other people I don’t know do it for me, without asking, without giving me any credit, is not my idea of something I should thank them for. I do give a fair amount of stuff away. This blog is all give away stuff. I get to decide what I should give away, not some half-wit who is trying to get a badge for uploading a lot of crap that he never modeled.

On GrabCAD is a bunch of stuff from the SolidWorks training manuals. Not stuff that students modeled, the actual models given out by SolidWorks. People upload these, with no mention about who the creator was, and they get comments like “cool stuff”, “great models”, “keep ‘em comin’”. So obviously no one is aware that the person posting the model had absolutely no role in creating the data that was being downloaded. You can tell who modeled something by right clicking on a feature, and selecting Feature Properties.

So, who else has models up there that people are misrepresenting? Mike Wilson, Dave Pancoast, Fred Koehler, Mark Biasotti, Matt Perez, whoever modeled those Audis, and a bunch more that I can’t just tell from sight. I’d bet that 80% of the models on GrabCAD are misrepresented (uploaded by someone other than the creator without credit). This whole event started because a reader alerted me that one of my books was up there.

I don’t usually comment on general news items on this blog, but the Stop Online Piracy Act is relevant to anyone who creates or owns patents or copyrighted data, which includes anyone who uses CAD software. Just as a warning, this post is a bit of a political rant, where my profession intersects politics, which is rare enough.

I have to admit, I don’t know all the details of the law, but it seems straight forward to me – the government is just saying they will uphold the law. There are laws against taking stuff that doesn’t belong to you, and having a society that accepts and follows laws is one of the cornerstones of civilization in general, and democracy in particular. The difference between law-abiding countries and lawless countries is obvious, and immense. You can’t even compare Western Europe or the US to places like Somalia or Yemen. One of the differences is the rule of law.

So, I don’t understand what makes theft ok as long as it is on the internet, or in digital or non-tangible form. Even back in the 1970s, re-recording tapes or records was commonly accepted – something you could do in front of your family and talk about in church. But it was still illegal. Today the same sort of theft is still rampant, if anything, even more widespread. Books, software, music are commonly stolen by the general digital population, but stuff like designs, and manufacturing data are also stolen by companies in China with absolutely no regard for patents or copyrights. Its as if people think they are entitled to it simply because it exists. It’s shocking to me that in China, the feelings of entitlement extend to corporations.

Generally, when you (or I anyway) think of fighting theft, you think of big corporations as being the ones behind legislation like SOPA. And its true. Big entertainment and software producers don’t like to have their stuff stolen. Nor do I, a small time book writer. Nor do you, if your company is being ripped off by China.

But in this case, it’s not a case of some huge, evil corporate giant against all the little people. In this case, it’s corporate giants fighting theft against corporate giants promoting theft. Google is one of the main opponents of SOPA. Google says that shutting down piracy would change the internet. Google says eliminating thievery would make the US as oppressive as places like China. Google thinks China is a good example to cite as what the US might become if we disallow digital thievery? Are you serious?!? I think Google looks at China as a competitor in the digital thievery market. Face it. If something is on the internet, it belongs to Google. Their bots crawl this site, and archive it. Regardless of copyright, regardless of permission, they have automated their thievery, and we all just roll over and accept it.

Google is acting all offended because Rupert Murdoch, a publisher, is tired of having Google steal literally every word he publishes. Murdoch correctly commented that Google either steals content and puts advertising around it or just displays other people’s stolen content, and puts advertising around it. Google, even without stealing anything themselves is still the biggest beneficiary from the theft of digital goods on earth.

I’m generally a fan of most Google stuff. Free stuff is cool, and most Google stuff is free, paid for by advertising. I’ve got a Google phone. I use Google Chrome browser, and on and on. But like any company that gets too big, it’s easy to go from cool to tyrant. It’s ironic, but while writing this, I just got an automated telephone call asking me to update my Google 411 information. So they own my personal data too. If you don’t give it to them, they just take it from where ever they can get it. If that isn’t organized theft, I’m not sure what is.

Some people believe that putting stuff on the internet is the same as giving it away. That’s only because by putting it on the internet, your stuff is sure to be stolen. In fact, the only way to make any money on the internet is through advertising, exactly because selling real content is hard to do when it is so commonly stolen.

I don’t know the details of the law, but it sounds like the government can just close down sites that are involved in theft. Just like the police put you in handcuffs if you bust a window and take a boom box, there is no discussion, they just do it. Is it “due process”? What “due process” do the victims of theft get? I think if you steal stuff, you should get what’s coming to you sooner rather than later. Is it going to solve the problem? Do handcuffs prevent thieves from stealing? No, of course not. It is however, a deterrent to some, and gives the victims some sense of justice.

I understand society isn’t perfect. I’m not interested in a white-washed pollyanna society. I am interested, however, in holding to account people and corporations who think they are above the law. The rule of law is a big part of what separates us from Somalia, and ignoring the rule of law is another step on a slippery slope back to that kind of un-civilization. I don’t know if I support the SOPA law as written, but I definitely support enforcing copyright and patent laws, and I definitely see corporations like Google and countries like China as perpetuating theft.

SolidWorks recent development resources are reportedly being used to develop IT answers to questions you may not have asked. People buy CAD software for several reasons, but I would guess that the most common reason is for use as a tool to develop product geometry, document the geometry, and prepare for manufacturing. CAD data is near the headwaters of the product development data stream, and there are a lot of valid downstream uses for the geometric data. You can make renderings, stress and motion analysis, create assembly instructions, write CNC toolpaths, attach meta data to the geometry, markup 2D or 3D images for revisions, and lots more.

CAD is definitely not the end of the line, or even the real beginning. There are a lot of opportunities for software development around the product development team. Here are some of the things I need CAD software to do – or some things I need to do with my CAD data. Do you have a list of stuff too?

• better idea generation tools – fast, visual, 3D
• better means to reuse results of idea generation in software more intended for accurate and detailed development and documentation
• I could really use a great (free) on-line viewer and markup for CAD data
• better 3D data reuse in general, and in particular a less cumbersome means to reuse mesh data
• more reliable software
• better control of the history tree
• better geometry diagnostics
• more reliable, controllable and flexible geometry creation methods
• more control over external references
• more reliable sketch relations and assembly mates
• bigger selection of real-world mechanical features, like a thread wizard, better shelling tools, a screw boss feature (as an option in the mounting boss feature)

If you look at the 2012 top 10 list, you don’t see people asking for sustainability software, cloud storage, or software to make a bad guess at how much something will cost to manufacture. You see people asking for CAD functions. Geometry creation, control, management, and documentation. Why has CAD development died if paying customers are still asking for it? Why are they trying to re-implement decades old IT scenarios when what we need from them is CAD?  At a time when bandwidth caps are being enforced even for land line internet connections, and when you have never been able to buy a more powerful desktop computer for under $2000, who is pushing applications onto the cloud? Does it make sense for small companies to do product development in that environment?

Tell us what functions you bought CAD software for in a comment.

I’ve put off talking about this topic for a while because it’s another one I don’t like, but it has been making more noise in various places, and it’s really grating me. I was contacted this past summer by a guy from the website Cadooku. If you try to visit now, you get the message that the model exchange is closed. No surprise to me, I guess. The fellow who contacted me wanted me to build a model of a football helmet for $60. Work at the time was slow, and it wasn’t a hard model, but he didn’t give me any real idea of the detail that he needed or the purpose for the model. I told him I’d do the work, which took me an afternoon. My normal rate is $75/hr, and this job took about 3-4 hours. In the end I never got paid. I never even heard back. I just sent my model away into the ether, and it was gone, along with my afternoon.

This is maybe not a typical “crowd source” experience. You probably won’t get someone approaching you directly asking you to model something, but one part of it was probably pretty typical – you might not get paid, and if you do get paid, it will be a lot less than you might normally get for the same kind of work. The parameters of the job may also be poorly defined.

The people who wind up doing this work aren’t going to be you or me. It’s going to be students and people from countries where the going wage is way below what it is in the US. There is no way to guarantee the skills, background or education of the person doing the work, or the originality of the work (could be copied from somewhere). There is also no way to verify that the software used is a legal copy. The quality of work that the customer receives is not guaranteed, and in fact, there may not be any way for the end customer to even contact the CAD jockey. In short, this is fly-by-night CAD work (I would hesitate to call it design, and it is certainly not real engineering).

In a time when unemployment is so high, and there are certainly plenty of engineers available out there, there is no reason to try to get design work done in this way. It disrespects the source of the work, and the design itself. It may turn out that there are some people willing to be disrespected to get the chance at being severely underpaid, but if it becomes widespread, it will lower standards so that anyone with any sort of graphics software becomes an “engineer”. When Obama “crowd sourced” the design of a campaign poster through a contest, it meant that a lot of people were going to do the work, and only one was going to get paid for it. That’s what we have to look forward to with this system.

I’ve heard people respond to critics by saying “well, it’s not for you, then”. You’re damned right. This is not good for engineering, manufacturing, or any related profession. You can come up with any sort of bad idea, slap a 21st century sounding name on it, call it “the future”, and people are supposed to automatically bow down and worship it. It makes a nice experiment, but that’s about it.

SolidWorks first foray into the cloud has been n!Fuze, an online sharing and markup app. It is widely seen as a flop as a product. Problems with the implementation and the marketing have left a lot of people wondering how SolidWorks saw this as an improvement over 3D Instant Website, which was discontinued just months before n!Fuze’s release. Still, some folks are eager to know more about cloud pricing, and now that we have seen a real cloud app from SolidWorks, albeit a dysfunctional one, we have something concrete upon which to base our usually baseless conjecture. n!Fuze is $70/month, requires 2 licenses to run (one for creator one for viewer), but only priced in 2 different time chunks: 12 months for $840 ($70/mo) or 3 months for $231 ($77/mo).

Matt West (only the messenger here) is the sacrificial lamb SolidWorks sends to defend them here on my blog without any new information. Matt’s a decent guy, but he’s defending what looks to be a more and more ridiculous situation, as time goes on. SolidWorks doesn’t offer any new information about cloud plans, while customers range from the restive to the resigned.

Here’s the argument, or one argument. If you don’t need something very much, you can rent it. That’s a common thing. I rented a hydraulic post hole digger because I only needed it for an afternoon, I wasn’t going to use it to make a living. Matt’s on solid ground so far.

But when you consider that n!Fuze is only offered in chunks of 3 or 12 months, it requires at least two paying licenses to use it, and you extend the pricing to SolidWorks sort of functionality, it could really start to add up. Say that SolidWorks has 50 times the functionality of n!Fuze (it easily has much more), lets be generous and say that SW would only be $250/month instead of $70x2x50=$7000. But you can’t just rent it for a day or a week. You have to rent it in chunks of 3 or 12 months, and by that time, you may have spent a couple thousand dollars.

If you’re going to spend that kind of money, you might as well just hire some chap in India to do the work for you for $15/hr. So SolidWorks online will sell a lot of outsourcing. Why pay that much for software, training, and an operator when you can go straight to the finished CAD data for much less? Even at engineering consulting rates of $75-$100/hr, consulting with a real pro would still be an attractive alternative to renting hardware/software. With a consultant you’re going the extra distance and also renting the operator, but only getting it all for the exact amount of time that you need. I mean, consultants don’t charge you for 3 months work, but only show up for 1 week, that’s ridiculous. Why should you “rent” software for any longer than you need it, it just doesn’t make sense.

I mean, let’s be clear, hardware is cheap these days. You can get a very passable box to run SolidWorks for $1500. That investment will last you 3 years. The software, depending on what you need is at least $4000. That’s a one-time investment. The operator is needed in both cases, but in a short term rental situation, it may be difficult to hire an experienced operator.

If you rent, at $250/month, in a year you pay $3000. At the end of the year all you get is a door slamming on your back. You might have data files (and you might not, if V6 is any indication with the database), but you won’t have access to the software any more. If you purchased, you would have your software nearly paid for at that point. After 2 years of renting, you have spent $500 more than purchase, and after 3 years of renting, you have spent $3500 (per seat) with absolutely nothing to show for it, and no “rent to own” value or buy out option. This doesn’t account for the extra cost of a heavy duty, extra reliable internet connection.

So, if the pricing scheme stays the way it has indicated with this first foray, I don’t think SolidWorks has a chance to sell much cloud. It would be a full-on cloudy car-wreck on the information highway.

There’s a reason why we aren’t getting any information about SolidWorks cloud plans: I think it could be because they still don’t know themselves. This whole thing is complicated, and beyond the new programming and the bugs it will bring, beyond the technology, beyond the argument of whether it is secure enough, beyond the argument about who owns the data and how to handle risk or breach, it may turn out that there will not be an economically viable business atmosphere in which to offer full-blown CAD for heavy duty use over the internet for even the next decade. If SolidWorks really doesn’t have this figured out nearly 2 years after the initial public announcement, I think the whole idea will at least be scaled back severely in order to do anything at all with it.

There’s another scheme, but it doesn’t involve extorting a lot of money from customers for a service that may not be a very good idea to begin with. It might actually allow customers to only buy what they need (gasp!!) There would be no maintenance, no guaranteed annual income, no need to buy services you don’t need and don’t use from resellers who can’t/won’t/don’t deliver. So I’m quite sure SolidWorks will not go this way. Autodesk also does not appear to be headed this way, they are plowing forward with a cloud subscription model. But let’s take a look at it anyway, and see what a company that respects its customers might do.

Take a look at this site, just as an example. I don’t have any attachment to these people, I just found them in a web search for “render farm service”. Rendering is something we have said several times would be a great application for distributed computing, and distributed computing is a form of cloud. Anyway, the pricing scheme here is not in huge chunks of time, it’s in Ghz hours. That’s processor clock speed x number of processors (cores) x number of hours to complete a job. So you just pay for what you use. Fair and simple.

(By the way, if you really do need a render farm’s services and you use Modo for rendering, Anna Wood has a service called RenderBay where she charges reasonable rates, on a pay for what you need basis.)

With a scheme like that, Matt’s assertion that you could just rent out what you need makes a lot more sense. But honestly, I don’t see SolidWorks doing pricing on a real time basis. They’ve made a business of selling people much more than they need for a long time, and I don’t see that changing. Just like the cell phone company selling you X minutes and you only ever use .6xX.

What I’m finding is that in reality, people range all over the map on the whole CAD in the cloud issue. There are a lot of “wait and see” folks out there. There are also a lot of people ready to drop maintenance at the next opportunity until this sorts itself out. The few folks who are upbeat about the cloud tend to be hawkish on the business side, (and they all have something to sell) looking to drive a hard bargain with people who they assume to be so desperate to touch SolidWorks that they will ignore any financial common sense that ever existed. There are those who simply believe “It’s the future!” (like $5 ATM access fees and 39% interest on credit cards – just roll over and take it). My position seems to change over time. Right now I’m of the opinion that it will be a decade before we see full-blown 3D CAD on the web. In the mean time, CAD In The Cloud will be scaled back to look like everything else that’s on the cloud – smaller, simpler, supporting applications without the huge underlying data and super intense graphics. CAD data on the cloud? You know, there might be some people willing to accept that, but I think the numbers will be small.

We’ve said a number of times the things that make sense for cloud or distributed computing in general: rendering, FEA, CFD, and stuff like that. Intense compute, distributable, controllable. I think SolidWorks is going to have to scale back and focus on these first. Of course they’re going to need to fix n!Fuze even before that. They could start by renaming it, and cutting an order of magnitude off the price, and make the rental period more granular.

I firmly believe at this point that Dassault has a big misconception about what the typical SolidWorks user is all about. When I worked with SolidWorks resellers, more than half of our sales came from small installations, 1-3 seats, and I doubt that ratio has changed much. All of this cloud stuff only makes sense for big installations, and then not Amazon cloud, but local cloud. I’ve talked to a lot of people within SolidWorks, from the resellers, from prominent users, CAD journalists, and self-appointed wonks. The most optimistic of them are cautious. The center seems to be wary of the changes.

I’ve heard the conjecture that SolidWorks is really being pushed to the cloud because there will be no way for semi-computer-literate end users to maintain their own installations. The V6 install will be based on Enovia and its databases. This is the type of install that you have professional IT people or a consultant to do. No wonder SolidWorks is now arguing that moving to the cloud eliminates the need for all that IT overhead – the current installation doesn’t require much, but the V6 one is sure to. It’s a problem that causes itself. This is the wrong direction for the typically independent SolidWorks user. Most of us bought SolidWorks because it simplified things,and V6 will severely complicate things, so they have to take it out of the end user’s hands and put it on the cloud. This is less based on conjecture than you might think. I’ve heard all of this in one form or another from more than one source.

To me, the real question is “when will SolidWorks/Dassault realize the problems inherent in this direction? I think they already know at least some of it. They are out on a limb already. The question is are they going to swallow some pride and come back to safety or are they going to start sawing?

SolidWorks is very proud (and defensive) of their documentation process which they call “task-based”. To be fair, it has worked well enough for them for the training materials which generally are well rated. Task-based training means that you train people by giving them steps to perform in the course of a “task” of some sort.

There is a discussion on the SolidWorks forums on which fellow SolidWorks whipping-boy Ben Eadie’s comments have been removed by the moderator. I read Ben’s comments before they were removed, and I don’t think they were worthy of that kind of treatment. They were a little self-promoting maybe, but certainly not removable. Having been in the same boat on multiple occasions with shenanigans on the forums, I can certainly sympathize.

The discussion is about SolidWorks documentation, and there are comments on both sides, for and against the quality and usefulness of it.

This is an argument I was reminded of recently, when I came across a section of the Help documentation that told you exactly how to create Groups and Machines in the Administrative Image Option Editor interface, but it didn’t tell you what Groups and Machines are, or how to use them or god forbid WHY they were wasting their breath telling you how to create them in the first place.

If you try to find these topics in the Help when not running the Administrative Image Option Editor, well, here were my results:

Looking in the SolidWorks 2009 Help index:

install – no results

admin – no results

option – “options” had about 30 results, but none of them was connected with the Option Editor.

group – “group annotations” was the only result

machine – “machine design tools”

Are you serious??!!?? No results for words like “install” or “admin”, which should also include installation and administration??!!?? None at all.

What’s the message SW is sending here? If you’re reading this Help, you’ve already got the software installed, so don’t worry about it?  Don’t use Index? Don’t have questions until you are actually in trouble doing something? Curiosity is a bad thing and will be punished? See, you really DO need your reseller after all? One thing that comes through loud and clear is that you cannot access all of the help from the SolidWorks 2009 Help. How am I learning this? You guessed it. This is task based training. In this case, I have been assigned an impossible task (finding help from the SolidWorks Help), and the lesson could not be more clear.

The only way to get back to that part of the Help is to run the Administrative Image Option Editor again. Ok, so lets do that. Ok, done. Now I’m back in that section of the Help. So I go again to the Index tab, and type in groups. Nothing. Machines. Same thing. You could go to the Search tab and get 300 irrelevant entries which you have to read in their entirety to make sure they do not have the information you are looking for, but I’ve taken that task based training long ago, and that lesson has also stuck with me.

How do I find this information? Somehow I stumble on a link that has the words “groups” and “machines”, and I follow that link. Ok, I’m back where I was yesterday. Here’s what I see:

To add a group:

1. right click global settings
2. click add group
3. enter the group name

Task based. Straight forward. Clear cut. Objective achieved. Right? Wrong. No, I did not come here to find out how to add a group, I came here to find out what a group IS. WHY is it there? SolidWorks does not have a problem with task-based training, they have a problem with existentialist questions, with definitions of underlying importance. They are so obsessed with the “how” question that they forgot there are other questions that people might have. “Why” for example.

To be honest, the “why” question is what I have written my books to answer. The “why” question is why beginner users and people mainly concerned with learning how to model a box (generally products of the institutional educational process) all hate my books so much – there’s too much information. After they watch some vapid video that shows you how to model a box, they need another one to show them how to model a cylinder. The SolidWorks tools are simple enough that the “how” question for a given task usually answers itself, but if you don’t even know that task is necessary, how to do it is no help at all.

So while the SolidWorks Help and Training materials go a long way to tell you how to mechanically do this or that, they do not in fact help you understand why you are doing it or why you might choose to do that in some situation in the future. The task-based documentation and training style does not help you make decisions, it simply gives you a fish. You have no idea how to get another fish, or what to do with the fish they have given you for that matter. It’s like the idiot in the picture is saying “Uh, thanks, but what do I do with this??” The documentation style helps the lowest level user with their second level of questions. It never addresses everyone’s most fundamental question that we never stop asking from age 3 on up. “Why?”

Warning: this blog post is a bit all over the place. Everything seems related in my head, or at least it did when I first wrote it. 1/3 history lesson, 2/3 future lesson. Trace relevance to CAD. Lamenting the rule of corporations. A bit of a crazy rant thrown in for good measure.

Some of you young punks may need help with the title of the post. Back in the era of black and white television, before ADD/ ADHD and Google, there was this thing called the “cold war”. No one dropped any bombs, but there was a bit of banging with a shoe.

After that, now pay attention. After that there was a movie where Slim Pickens, the great cowboy actor when even Sam Elliot was a young punk, rode an atomic bomb out of the gate of a B-52 somewhere short of the target in Russia. The movie of course was Dr. Strangelove or: How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb, and it is a cold war cult classic. Get the torrent, no one pays for content any more.

If you’re the paranoid type, you may want to take whatever sort of medication keeps you from panicking right about now. Maybe take a handful.

So. The cold war was all about paranoia. And so, it turns out, is most of the jive about “the cloud”. Of course behind the paranoia are some very real reasons to not love what’s going on. It turns out that your CAD hardware and software choices are being driven by pop culture and electronic toys. But hold it, I thought CAD was a tool used to create the electronic toys that drive pop culture? Well, yes. A bit of circular logic, it seems. Sure it’s the new thing, and everything is headed that way, but why? Is there a reason? I’ve always been told that renting an apartment or a car is just throwing money away. Why is it any different to rent compute power, especially when it is so cheap to own? Is this being done for me or to me?

“The cloud” is much larger than this little announcement by SolidWorks at SWW10. It is the entire computer/software/internet industry. I think it is instructive to listen to what other people have to say. The folks among us who are pushing the cloud are either industry observers, or people with something to sell. That’s the first thing to learn. So people with a stake in there being a steady stream of stuff that you can’t live without believe in the cloud. I tend to ignore the lemmings who just buy every new gadget because its new. For these people tech is fashion, not tooling.

The second thing to notice when reading what non-CAD folks have to say is that there are a lot of skeptics, even among the gadget enthusiasts. So users in general aren’t all falling down in front of the pre-marketing tenderizer that is currently trying to soften us all up for when the shoe finally falls. Corporations are pouring money into this right now. They are betting that users are going to buy into it. There is so much additional profit at stake for them, that theymust make it work. Users don’t stand a chance. The free market is not so free at all.

There were some links going around this weekend, and I sat down to catch up reading. The most interesting thing that caught my eye was entitled “The real reason why Steve Jobs hates Flash”. Well, I hate flash, and I’m not real big on Steve Jobs. I thought that Jobs and Adobe would not see eye to eye because they were direct competitors in a bid to rule the Earth. It turns out that’s not far from the truth.

Anyway, I recommend you go and read the original article by clicking on the image from Charlie’s Diary. If you don’t want to read the whole thing, I have some quotes here for you, sprinkled with commentary.

Software will be delivered as a service to users wherever they are, via whatever device they’re looking at — their phone, laptop, tablet, the TV, a direct brain implant, whatever. (Why is this? Well, it’s what everyone believes — everyone in the industry, anyway. Because it offers a way to continue to make money, by selling software as a service, despite the cost of the hardware exponentially dropping towards zero. And, oh, it lets you outsource a lot of annoying shitty admin tasks like disk management, backup, anti-virus, and so on.)

Huh. So “the cloud” is a concept being pushed by people who are not making money any longer on hardware, so they have to push something they can make money on. “The cloud” is in no way a user initiative, it is just a way to extend the profitability of portable electronic toys.

And because the hardware is so cheap to own right now, why exactly is it that I should rent it and pay more?

The App Store and the iTunes Store have taught Steve Jobs that ownership of the sales channel is vital. Even if he’s reduced to giving the machines away, as long as he can charge rent for access to data (or apps) he’s got a business model.

Whoa. Rent your own data. Why would I push all my data to the cloud if I just have to turn around and rent it back? Honestly. This doesn’t make a bit of sense from a user point of view. Why not Win7 that allows you to serve and stream your own data from your own location? That makes more sense.

Apple are trying desperately to force the growth of a new ecosystem — one that rivals the 26-year-old Macintosh environment — to maturity in five years flat. That’s the time scale in which they expect the cloud computing revolution to flatten the existing PC industry.

The time scale here is exactly what SolidWorks is talking about. 2 – 5 years, with some stuff happening this year. Plus, is this guy saying Apple is responsible in the end for SolidWorks pushing customers to the cloud? Idon’t think Apple is solely responsible, but it is a bigger movement from  industry who has seen all of the profitability go out of hardware sales, is desperately looking for a way to control software piracy, and much greater profitability in renting compute power from a fixed location (cloud) to a mobile location (your iPad). And Jobs is certainly a high profile hardware seller.

Steve Jobs undoubtedly believes what he (or an assistant) wrote in his thoughts on flash: “Flash is a cross platform development tool. It is not Adobe’s goal to help developers write the best iPhone, iPod and iPad apps. It is their goal to help developers write cross platform apps.” And he really does not want cross-platform apps that might divert attention and energy away from his application ecosystem.

Ohhh, I get it. So Jobs likes progress as long as it is progress that puts money in his pocket, not someone elses. Cross-platform is ok as long as Apple is the main beneficiary. General cross-platform where anyone can benefit is evil. Check, I understand Mr. Jobs. Highly hypocritical, but I think we have come to expect that from him.

The long term goal is to support the long-term migration of Apple from being a hardware company with a software arm into being a cloud computing company with a hardware subsidiary — almost like Google, if you squint at the Google Nexus One in the right light. The alternative is to join the PC industry in a long death spiral into irrelevance.

So. In a nutshell, Steve Jobs really is the mastermind Dr. Evil trying to rule the Earth. Cloud is an industry initiative to squeeze more profit out of consumers and giving back mainly portability. That’s great for electronic toys, but – and I’m really squinting here – but I just don’t see the application to CAD. Uh, is this when CAD makes paper obsolete like they’ve been predicting for decades now?

I’m sorry. The Cloud is a sham being foisted on users exclusively for profit, not because it first answers user needs. Sure some users will benefit from this. But the user need is like 25% or less, and the corporation is going to try to force it to 100% because of profit concerns.

I’m as much a supporter of the free market as any other small business owner, but this is not the free market. This is a handful of unstoppably huge corporations stacking the deck. Once corporations grow past a certain point, they become a liability not only to society but also to civilization. The democrats and republicans are fading into irrelevance. Corporate brands are what rule America now, and the vote is clearly rigged.

<off-the-meds rant warning>

For those of you who are still guessing, I’m an anti-corporate, anti-marketing, plain-speaking individualist. I despise the affects of advertising in our everyday lives. I think that given accurate information, people can make informed decisions about what products suit their needs the best. Advertising and marketing play on the emotions rather than support rational decision making. It is better to have a “cool” product than one that actually functions as advertised. The idea that all entertainment, all public facing media whatsoever must be run through the corporate marketing filter is un-American, un-democratic, and the most blatant form of rule of the corporations that we have yet seen.

Corporations run the government, the arts, the environment, our health, our education, our waking hours, they control all the ideas that get into our minds, and the ideas that come out of our minds.

So when people argue with me that advertising on your blog does not turn your head, well, people are welcome to an opinion, even if it is wrong. I don’t care who you are, if you advertise something on your site, you give up the right to speak freely about it. If you accept freebies from a company, its the same thing. The recent ridiculous flap about the 3D connexion spaceballs, and previous ones about freebies doled out by SW Corp to bloggers who fit the harness, and even people who have complained about me putting their blogs on the “Commercial Blogs” section of my blog roll instead of the main blog roll I reserve for places you can go and not get inundated with the relentless commercial crap that drives almost everything. (whoa! now if I were a real media mogul, I could never get away with a sentence like that, but as an amateur, the sky is the limit!)

Well, I hate to say I told you so (not really, but let’s just say that I do), but , “I told you so”. So there. This is a hot topic with the professional press, and why shouldn’t it be a hot topic with the amateur press? Other than grammar, qualifications, education, and money, the main differences are usually passion and expertise in the topic they write about.

No doubt all of this individualism puts me on the outs with SolidWorks, other SolidWorks bloggers, the CAD media, and just about all other corporatized means of extorting money from the public or commercial worlds. We are all corporate zombies, or if you like, you could use the Matrix catechism. Fiscal growth is powered by population growth, which is the 800 pound gorilla that no one mentions that is killing every way of life we know except stacked on top of one another in concrete menageries.

Here are a few references to read. Bloggers, start your 1099s.

FTC to go after blogger freebies

Microsoft and free laptops to bloggers

How to tell an independent blogger from a salesman

Mommy bloggers

blogger in favor of standards